Hmm, a couple of posts that I forgot post. Oh well. I ended up stuck down in Brownsville not one, but two days which entirely blew out my hopes of going to the auction. There will always be another one, yes, but now that i have a cheaper, simpler plan to at least get some kind of business going, getting land is the prerequisite. Mobile home parks take a lot of land and a lot more resources to make them viable. RV Parks, on the other hand, only take a small plot of land and a lot less infrastructure in terms of quantity and hence cheaper to build. It would still cost, but not near as much as a full blown mobile home court.
I'm just thinking of what I can do in the near future, instead of something that will be years and years down the road. A 20 spot RV court wouldn't take more than a few acres of land. It would bring in enough to pay for a person to live there and run the place and other expenses that are germane to such a venture. Pull throughs/overnighters could be charged a fixed sum per night - much higher of course - and not have to have electric meters and water meters at them, the permanent ones where people are living in them would have to have at least electric meters. A lot of those parks don't charge extra for water tho.
Scaling down my ambitions would make it a more viable goal, is the point. Start small, stay small if necessary, but have more than one location. As I said in a previous post, there are RV parks all around this area and they are all either totally full or mostly full. Make it appealing, no trashy dump type of place and get it done. If I can just get the land, I can take out a loan to do the infrastructure installation and doing the driveway and pads. And interestingly, a lot of these places are not in town and are outside of the city limits. County rules are almost always more lax than in-city rules concerning building and restrictions.
Whatever the case, an empty trailer showed up around noon yesterday, I hopped right on that and headed on down the highway. My manager calls an hour later, puts me on conference call with another driver who showed up last night, complaining that I had taken the empty trailer? Dude, I have been there two days, that was my trailer to take. That ended that conversation. My manager ended that call and called back without the conference. Did Sheila say something about my going on vacation? He asked, referencing a statement I had made in the conference call about having had heard he was already on vacation.
He was worried about that for some reason. I replied no, another driver made that comment. Gee, you guys really do talk alot among each other! Well, yes we do to some extent. It wasn't long and Sheila texted me - with a run for tomorrow which is now today. Gag, I thought, I'd really like a full day at home after being on the road five days. But, after seeing it - it's an Oklahoma run, late load time at 2:30 pm. So, It's overnight trip and then back home tomorrow afternoon. So I slept at home last night, have this morning here with the doggies, out again but back soon enough. This OK trip will go on the same pay period as the 2 brownsvilles which will make an extraordinarly large paycheck. My manager indicated he had hoped the Brownsville would make up for the s*** runs he had given me.
Well sort of, but I have two low paychecks in a row. I would need two big paychecks to make up for that loss.
One of the drivers that doesn't unload? Is now an unloader. Thanks to another driver who has been there much longer than me, we have talked alot about this situation and how to go about addressing it to the manager. I talked to the manager about it followed by him on another day. Calm, cool, collected, making valid, rational reasoning arguments, no emotional outbursts. The manager agreed to let him train the two drivers. This first one hadn't knowingly whined about having to unload, it's the other dude that boasted he will never have to learn. No one likes that guy because he has a really bad attitude all the time. Be that as it may, he still should have to do the same work everyone else has to do. So, it will be interesting to see if the manager also forces him to get the training as well and what this guy's reaction to it will be. I'm sure he's just loving the constant Brownsville runs.
Another driver made a comment to him about "Brownsville is your exclusive" run, which is when the driver got pissed and walked off. Look, it's really management's fault that they haven't forced these people to learn, but the driver going around boasting he doesn't have to unload and that the company never will force him to - kind of pours gasoline on the fire. And makes the rest of us more determined to get him to learn or get him moved to another division. It's quite easy to fill spots in our division because it's become known that it pays quite well - but that's only because of us being part of another company before being bought out. THAT company paid quite well. The new company took away several perks, but we're still making good money.
The insurance company is supposed to get back with them - James and Taylor - today about what, if anything, will be covered. They said the moisture is "in" the house, not coming from outside of it. Well from where? Was my question. The AC is on all the time taking moisture out of the air. We can't find any water leaks anywhere, that is very perplexing. I dunno how that is going to pan out, but if they don't cover any of it, the fact of the matter is we're going to have to do the kitchen at the very minimum.
Some extremely disheartening news about my son - but I am not at liberty at this point to speak that out to anyone. Major life event, I'll call it. No, nothing about his health. It was kind of shocking to hear the news. I wish I could go into it but I promised him I wouldn't say anything on social media or the internet about the specifics of it, so I won't. Once he comes out and says something about it, then I'll be at liberty to say.
James has been working on getting that concrete pillar out of the ground. He's determined, I'll give him credit for that. The pond setup is in limbo until that thing is out of the way. I haven't even checked on the fish, best go out and make sure the aerator is still on and pumping air into the bucket. They're abourt 2 inches long, nothing huge but I don't think they can live in there indefinitely. But I have nowhere else to put them, so I can only hope they will survive in there. Even after James gets that thing knocked out, it's going to take quite a bit of work to get a pond up and running before I can dump fish in there. Plus the part about snakes and birds and raccoons that I have to deal with.
Well, it's amazing how fast time flies by when you don't really want it to. The morning is almost gone, I need to start getting ready to head out.
G'day.
